Terminal: a miracle play with popular music from the end of the world

Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World is a film and live performance project exploring the politics of post-apocalyptic fiction. A theatrical staging of a morality play for end times and future folk music, it recasts eschatology, as a foundational myth for a future society. Post-apocalyptic writing and cinema are grounded in an ethos of survivalism. Invoking Rousseau’s state of nature, or time before government, these fictions propose violent scenarios in which nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe and other disasters generate an individualistic politics of pure pragmatism, negating the possibility of democratic deliberation. Terminal narrates this familiar scenario, but at the same time questions its validity. The film, shot on black and white VHS at Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbarn in Cumbria, dramatises a series of conversations between future-historical archetypes about the needs and pressures of the situation in which they find themselves at the end of the world. The performers then gather to play worshipful songs about acid rain, radiation sickness and eating the dog, using a mix of conventional, obscure and makeshift instruments In the tradition of books such as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Arthur M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Terminal imagines artistic expression and new folk traditions for a world to come after the apocalypse. If, as Slavoj Žižek would have it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to think of the end of capitalism, the project juxtaposes these two endpoints to test out how alternative scenarios might emerge from the collaborative practice of making theatre and music against a setting of social collapse.

Back to the margins in search of the core: "Foreign Land"'s geography of exclusion

The crisis of the national project in the early 1990s, caused by a short-lived but disastrous government, led Brazilian art cinema, for the first time, to look at itself as periphery and re-approach the old colonial center, Portugal. Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land (Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, 1995), a film about Brazilian exiles in Portugal, is the best illustration of this perspective shift which provides a new sense of Brazil’s scale and position within a global context. Shot mainly on location in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, it promotes the encounter of Lusophone peoples who find a common ground in their marginal situation. Rather than as a former empire, Portugal is defined by its situation at the edge of Europe and by beliefs such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when the country was dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of “core” or “center” are devolved to the realm of myth. The film’s carefully crafted dialogue combines Brazilian, Portuguese and Creole linguistic peculiarities into a common dialect of exclusion, while language puns trigger visual rhymes which refer back to the Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave) repertoire and restage the imaginary of the discovery turned into unfulfilled utopia. The main characters also acquire historical resonances, as they are depicted as descendants of Iberian conquistadors turned into smugglers of precious stones in the present. Their activities define a circuit of international exchange which resonates with that of globalized cinema, a realm in which Foreign Land, made up of citations and homage to other cinemas, tries to retrieve a sense of belonging.

Paraméricas Utópicas: entranced and transient nations in "I Am Cuba" (1964) and "Land in Anguish" (1967)

This article examines the astonishing similarities between two political films, Land in Trance (Glauber Rocha, 1967) and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964). Both address the subject of revolution through the enactment of trance. Both reject all forms of naturalistic account, adopting a series of anti-realist devices, such as poetic language, synecdoche, personification, parable and allegory, as a means of expanding the concept of the nation beyond territorial borders and conveying the meaning of revolution through the film form, rather than its content. Because there is no evidence that Glauber Rocha had seen I Am Cuba before he shot Land in Trance, these coincidences are treated as an intellectual 'transit' between film-makers whose art was fuelled by cinephilia and the belief in the reality of the film medium.

Back to the margins in search of the core: foreign land's geography of exclusion

The crisis of the national project in the early 1990s, caused by a short-lived but disastrous government, led Brazilian art cinema, for the first time, to look at itself as periphery and re-approach the old colonial centre, Portugal. Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land (Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, 1995), a film about Brazilian exiles in Portugal, is the best illustration of this perspective shift aimed at providing a new sense of Brazil’s scale and position within a global context. Shot mainly on location in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, it promotes the encounter of Lusophone peoples who find a common ground in their marginal situation. Even Portugal is defined by its location at the edge of Europe and by beliefs such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when the country was dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of ‘core’ or ‘centre’ are devolved to the realm of myth. The film’s carefully crafted dialogues combine Brazilian, Portuguese and Creole linguistic peculiarities into a common dialect of exclusion, while language puns trigger visual rhymes which refer back to the Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave) repertoire and restage the imaginary of the discovery turned into unfulfilled utopia. The main characters also acquire historical resonances, as they are depicted as descendants of Iberian conquistadors turned into smugglers of precious stones in the present. Their activities define a circuit of international exchange which resonates with that of globalized cinema, a realm in which Foreign Land, made up of citations and homage to other cinemas, tries to retrieve a sense of belonging.

Trevor Griffiths' 'Absolute Beginners': socialist humanism and the television studio

This article examines how conventional studio production strategies were active in the construction of political meaning in the 1974 television play 'Absolute Beginners' written by Trevor Griffiths. Produced for the BBC anthology series Fall of Eagles, the play dramatises Lenin's involvement with the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) and explores the contradictions between personal ethics and political necessity. Through close textual analysis and contextual discussion of other plays in the series, this piece demonstrates how shot patterns and spatial and performative devices in 'Absolute Beginners' supported the drama's socialist-humanist themes. Drawing on existing writing about the studio mode, it argues that the qualities of intimacy and presentational distance that it engendered were highly appropriate for the personal and the political dialectic in 'Absolute Beginners'. While using authorship as a convenient category for referring to the coherence of Griffiths' thematic concerns and dramatic structure during this period, the article complicates notions of the television dramatist as author by arguing for the importance of visual style and showing how 'ordinary' studio form was operational in the play's political meanings.

High-latitude climate sensitivity to ice-sheet forcing over the last 120kyr

Interpretation of ice-core records is currently limited by paucity of modelling at adequate temporal and spatial resolutions. Several key questions relate to mechanisms of polar amplification and inter-hemispheric coupling on glacial/interglacial timescales. Here, we present the first results from a large set of global ocean–atmosphere climate model ‘snap-shot’ simulations covering the last 120 000 years using the Hadley Centre climate model (HadCM3) at up to 1 kyr temporal resolution. Two sets of simulations were performed in order to examine the roles of orbit and greenhouse gases versus ice-sheet forcing of orbital-scale climate change. A series of idealised Heinrich events were also simulated, but no changes to aerosols or vegetation were prescribed. This paper focuses on high latitudes and inter-hemispheric linkages. The simulations reproduce polar temperature trends well compared to ice-core reconstructions, although the magnitude is underestimated. Polar amplification varies with obliquity, but this variability is dampened by including variations in land ice coverage, while the overall amplification factor increases. The relatively constant amplification of Antarctic temperatures (with ice-sheet forcing included) suggests it is possible to use Antarctic temperature reconstructions to estimate global changes (which are roughly half the magnitude). Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation varies considerably only with the introduction of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, but only weakens in the North Atlantic in the deep glacial, when ocean–sea-ice feedbacks result in the movement of the region of deep convection to lower latitudes and with the introduction of freshwater to the surface North Atlantic in order to simulate Heinrich events.

The politics of slowness and the traps of modernity

This chapter re-evaluates the diachronic, evolutionist model that establishes the Second World War as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and ‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analysing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1954), with a view to investigating the role of the long take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a supposed ‘slow modernity’. By resorting to Ozu and Mizoguchi, I hope to demonstrate that the best narrative films in the world have always combined a ‘classical’ quest for perfection with the ‘modern’ doubt of its existence, hence the futility of classifying cinema in general according to an evolutionary and Eurocentric model based on the classical-modern binary. Rather than on a confusing politics of the modern, I will draw on Bazin’s prophetic insight of ‘impure cinema’, a concept he forged in defence of literary and theatrical screen adaptations. Anticipating by more than half a century the media convergence on which the near totality of our audiovisual experience is currently based, ‘impure cinema’ will give me the opportunity to focus on the confluence of film and theatre in these Mizoguchi and Ozu films as the site of a productive crisis where established genres dissolve into self-reflexive stasis, ambiguity of expression and the revelation of the reality of the film medium, all of which, I argue, are more reliable indicators of a film’s political programme than historical teleology. At the end of the journey, some answers may emerge to whether the combination of the long take and the long shot are sufficient to account for a film’s ‘slowness’ and whether ‘slow’ is indeed the best concept to signify resistance to the destructive pace of capitalism.

Sangue e carne no cinema de Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

'Macunaíma' (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969) ends with a shot of blood emerging from the water. This text proposes an approach to this image following a comparison with other films by the same filmmaker: 'Couro de gato' (1960) and 'Os Inconfidentes' (1972). The main thesis is that in these images the aesthetical work with flesh synthesizes the ritual cannibalism and the capitalist one. This synthesis is specified in heroes’ assimilation by power.

Coupling liquid MALDI MS to liquid chromatography

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation (MALDI) coupled with time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry (MS) is a powerful tool for the analysis of biological samples, and nanoflow high-performance liquid chromatography (nanoHPLC) is a useful separation technique for the analysis of complex proteomics samples. The off-line combination of MALDI and nanoHPLC has been extensively investigated and straightforward techniques have been developed, focussing particularly on automated MALDI sample preparation that yields sensitive and reproducible spectra. Normally conventional solid MALDI matrices such as α-cyano-4-hydroxycinnamic acid (CHCA) are used for sample preparation. However, they have limited usefulness in quantitative measurements and automated data acquisition because of the formation of heterogeneous crystals, resulting in highly variable ion yields and desorption/ ionization characteristics. Glycerol-based liquid support matrices (LSM) have been proposed as an alternative to the traditional solid matrices as they provide increased shot-to-shot reproducibility, leading to prolonged and stable ion signals and therefore better results. This chapter focuses on the integration of the liquid LSM MALDI matrices into the LC-MALDI MS/MS approach in identifying complex and large proteomes. The interface between LC and MALDI consists of a robotic spotter, which fractionates the eluent from the LC column into nanoliter volumes, and co-spots simultaneously the liquid matrix with the eluent fractions onto a MALDI target plate via sheath flow. The efficiency of this method is demonstrated through the analysis of trypsin digests of both bovine serum albumin (BSA) and Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1 proteins.

O touro fica: anotações sobre 'O Testamento de Dom Quixote'

'O Testamento de Dom Quixote', 'script' by Glauber Rocha, is supposed to be loosely inspired in the last chapter of Cervantes' novel, although it is absolutely different from it: in the film the character doesn't recover his lucidity, but he lives surrounded by mystical delirium. Already in its first pages, it is obvious that it is a first draft of 'Cutting Heads', the film he shot in Spain in 1970, in spite of being completely different from the final movie. The comparison between both works allows us to see to what extent this essential seed was a forgotten one: the film was always publicised as a version of 'Macbeth', a reference which is missing here, and the 'Quijote' was never considered a point of depart, although its work with reality and dream determined the tone of the film from the very beginning.